A Sukkah in the Shadow of Saint Ignatius: Essays on the History of Jewish-Christian Relations

By Jeremy Brown

"A Sukkah in the Shadow of Saint Ignatius" is a trio of essays commemorating the 2017 and 2018 University of San Francisco Speaker Series in the History of Jewish-Christian Relations. The volume is a joint publication of the Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Social Thought and the Ignatian Tradition, and the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice.

The essays contained in this volume explore the two-millennium history of Jewish-Christian relations through focused investigations of central topics.

Natalie Latteri (USF) examines the thorny problem of inter-religious polemic in her study of how Jews in medieval Ashkenaz recounted the infancy of Jesus of Nazareth.

Ariel Evan Mayse (Stanford) surveys the variety of attitudes toward Christianity in Hasidism and Neo-Hasidism, and reflects on the potential of Neo-Hasidic theology for generating a platform of interreligious cooperation.

Jeremy P. Brown (McGill) interrogates the limits of religious hospitality as an institutional mandate for hosting Jewish Studies at Christian Universities. The volume opens with a frank exchange of letters between Aaron Hahn Tapper (USF) and Erin Brigham (USF) that wrestles with the ethical, religious, and social challenges confronting the development of Jewish Studies within a Jesuit Catholic academic environment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John R. Mabry
• Release date: Mar 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781949643527

Jeremy Brown

Dr. Jeremy Brown trained at University College School of Medicine in London and completed his residency in emergency medicine in Boston. He was the Research Director in the Department of Emergency Medicine at George Washington University before moving to the National Institutes of Health, where he now directs its Office of Emergency Care Research. His opinion pieces have been published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and he has written for Discover magazine.

Book preview

A SUKKAH IN THE SHADOW OF SAINT IGNATIUS

Essays on the History of Jewish-Christian Relations

A joint publication of The Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Social Thought and the Ignatian Tradition & The Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice

Edited by

Jeremy P. Brown

Published by the

UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO PRESS

Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Social Thought and the Ignatian Tradition

&

Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice

University of San Francisco

2130 Fulton Street

San Francisco, CA 94117-1080

www.usfca.edu/lane-center

Collection copyright © 2020

ISBN 978-1-949643-51-0 | paperback

ISBN 978-1-949643-52-7 | epub

Ebook version 1

Authors retain the copyright to their individual essays.

Published by the University of San Francisco Press through the Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Social Thought and the Ignatian Tradition of the University of San Francisco.

The Lane Center Series promotes the center’s mission to advance the scholarship and application of the Catholic intellectual tradition in the church and society with an emphasis on social concerns. The series features essays by Lane Center scholars, guest speakers, and USF faculty. It serves as a written archive of Lane Center events and programs and allows the work of the center to reach a broader audience.

Cover: Photography by Arvin Temkar.

The Lane Center Series

Published by the Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Social Thought and the Ignatian Tradition at the University of San Francisco, the Lane Center Series explores intersections of faith and social justice. Featuring essays that bridge interdisciplinary research and community engagement, the series serves as a resource for social analysis, theological reflection, and education in the Jesuit tradition.

Visit the Lane Center’s website to download each volume and view related resources at www.usfca.edu/lane-center

Volumes

Beyond Borders:

Reflections on the Resistance & Resilience Among Immigrant Youth and Families

Catholic Identity in Context:

Vision and Formation for the Common Good

Today I Gave Myself Permission to Dream:

Race and Incarceration in America

Islam at Jesuit Colleges and Universities

Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism in the United States:

The Challenge of Becoming a Church for the Poor

The Declaration on Christian Education: Reflections by the Institute for Catholic Education Leadership and the Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Studies and Social Thought

Dorothy Day:

A Life and Legacy

Editor

Erin Brigham

Lane Center, University of San Francisco

Editorial Board

KIMBERLY RAE CONNOR

School of Management, University of San Francisco

THERESA LADRIGAN-WHELPLEY

Salve Regina University

CATHERINE PUNSALAN-MANLIMOS

University of Detroit Mercy

LISA FULLAM

Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University

DONAL GODFREY, S.J.

University Ministry, University of San Francisco

MARK MILLER

Department of Theology and Religious Studies,

University of San Francisco

MARK POTTER

Newton Country Day School of the Sacred Heart, Newton MA

FRANK TURNER, S.J.

Delegate for the Jesuit Intellectual Apostolate, London

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Letters between the directors of the Lane Center and Swig Program

ERIN BRIGHAM AND AARON HAHN TAPPER

Infancy Stories of Jesus: Apocrypha and Toledot Yeshu in Medieval Europe

NATALIE E. LATTERI

Beyond the Pale: Hasidism, Neo-Hasidism and Jewish-Christian Dialogue

ARIEL EVAN MAYSE

Jewish Historical Testimony at the Table of Christian Hospitality

JEREMY P. BROWN

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice, the Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Social Thought and the Ignatian Tradition, the USF Department of Theology and Religious Studies, and especially the Jesuit Foundation for their generous backing of both the Speaker Series in the History of Jewish-Christian Relations, and the present volume. I acknowledge too the support of the USF History Department, and from the broader San Francisco community, Lehrhaus Judaica, Grace Cathedral, Congregation Beth Shalom, and San Francisco Interfaith Council.

The scholars who brought their research and insights for the 2017 series were Eva Mrocek (UC Davis), Deena Aranoff (Graduate Theological Union), and Naomi Seidman (then Graduate Theological Union, now University of Toronto). 2018 scholars were Roberto Mata (University of Santa Clara), Natalie Latteri (then University of New Mexico, now USF), and Ariel Evan Mayse (Stanford University). I am particularly grateful to Latteri and Mayse for developing their talks into essays for this publication. Members of the USF faculty who participated as respondents included Aysha Hidayatullah, Katrina Olds, Erin Brigham, and Paolo Gamberini.

Two individuals were instrumental in bringing the series to fruition and seeing this volume to publication: Aaron Hahn Tapper and Erin Brigham. I have learned a great deal over the past three years from our work together, both personally and professionally. Both Hahn Tapper and Brigham made themselves available to the project without limits, always with tremendous grace, understanding, and humor. Their feedback at every stage contributed in substantial ways to a fine set of results. Though we set out from a place of mutual respect, my esteem for these scholars has only grown through our collaboration.

Oren Kroll-Zeldin provided sound advice and critical support on several occasions.

Lastly, I am indebted to the administrative efficiency and kindness of Monica Doblado and Alison Cunningham.

—Jeremy P. Brown, Frankfurt, Germany

24th of Tevet, 5780; January 22, 2020

Letters between Erin Brigham,¹ the director of Lane Center, and Aaron Hahn Tapper,² the director of the Swig Program

Dear Erin,

I appreciate our having this opportunity to converse about this intriguing collection of essays, which emerged out of our spring 2017 and spring 2018 University of San Francisco Speaker Series in the History of Jewish-Christian Relations. As you know, each of these two spring semesters we offered a three-part series where scholars addressed the phenomenon of inter-communal relations between Jews and Christians in the ancient, medieval, and modern periods, an academic program dedicated to promoting a historical-critical ethos for studying and teaching Jewish-Christian relations writ large. Offered through USF’s Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice, which I direct, these six lectures were co-sponsored by the Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Social Thought and the Ignatian Tradition (which you direct), as well as the Jesuit Foundation and the Department of Theology & Religious Studies. For me, the topics addressed under the umbrella of the ancient and medieval periods directly connect to the contemporary period, that is Jewish-Christian Relations in twenty-first-century America.

Although this series was conceived, shaped, and implemented almost single-handedly by teacher and scholar par excellence, Swig JSSJ Program faculty member Professor Jeremy P. Brown—who is also the editor of this book—it was incredibly important to me that the Lane Center, under your leadership, didn’t blink when approached to come on board as our chief co-sponsor. Throughout my thirteen years on our Jesuit Catholic university campus I have come to take such support for granted. As such, I’d like to express my gratitude to you, the Lane Center, and our larger campus community for consistently supporting Jewish Studies at USF. Along these lines, it is important to note that, founded in 1977, our Jewish Studies program was the first program and endowed chair in Jewish Studies established at a Catholic-identified college or university campus worldwide. (In 2008, when we were re-established as the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice, we again broke historical ground, this time becoming the first academic program in the world to formally link Jewish Studies with Social Justice). It’s as if expect this amazing support, one of my notable blindspots. For this I apologize.

I offer this mea culpa first and foremost because it is important to lay it out there. Second, I submit this admission because I want what I am about to say to be understood within the context of my appreciation. In other words, although I am about to offer some personal reflections on Jewish-Christian relations using an analytical lens bordering on the critical, I do so with the knowledge that I am able to do this precisely because of the safe space I have experienced as a Jew who directs a Jewish Studies program at a Jesuit Catholic university (located in a Christian-majority country). And I do so with a deep and sincere recognition of my time at USF since 2007, which has been incredible, and an understanding that everything I am able to do at USF with Jewish Studies is due to the support of the USF administration and larger community.

It must also be said that I fully recognize that I come to this project with emotional baggage rooted in the violent historical backdrop of interactions between Jews and Christians for millennia, contact that has notably ended in death for Jews at the hands of Christians far too many times. (I am also cognizant of the textual evidence of Jews dismissing Christians, found, among other places, in Natalie Latteri’s, "Infancy Stories of Jesus: Apocrypha and the Toledot Yeshu in Medieval Europe and Ariel Mayse’s Beyond the Pale: Hasidism, Neo-Hasidism and Jewish-Christian Dialogue," both of which are also found in this volume).

This all said… As an educator who focuses his course work and research on contemporary issues, perhaps it should not be surprising that of the three essays in this collection Jeremy Brown’s Jewish Historical Testimony at the Table of Christian Hospitality deeply resonates with me, particularly his thesis question related to the hospitality complex that binds the differentiated domain of Jewish historical testimony in research and teaching about religion conducted at Christian institutions, as well as such statements as there are serious risks at stake when the academic discipline of Jewish Studies yokes itself to performing the ‘guest labor’ of Christian conscience.

Brown begins his essay with an epigraph written by Aristotle, The guest will judge better of a feast than the cook. This idea reflects a core aspect of my experiences at USF. To take it one step further, the vantage point of a member of a minority community in a given space is far different, on the whole, than that of a member of a majority community. Although the guest/host dyad is different than the minority/majority one, and sometimes these two pairings are distinct, for me they are one and the same in this particular situation; being a member of the Jewish community on a Catholic-identified campus lends itself to particular perceptions that I would not have, say, if I was a member of the campus community at Yeshiva University, for example, a Jewish-majority learning environment located in New York City (an urban center with the second most Jews of any city worldwide, and most in the US). Put another way, to some degree I have experienced my time at USF as a guest at a host institution.³

In this regard, my experiences at USF have been shaped by countless on-campus micro-events. This has included those linked to seemingly mundane scheduling issues, such as the recent scheduling of the December 2019 USF graduation ceremony to take place on a Friday evening, which, for me, corresponds to the Jewish Sabbath (Shabbat), a time I spend with my family. This has also included theologically weighted rituals, such as choosing the following verse to open the August 2019 USF Mass of the Holy Spirit—especially when taking into account that this university- and community-wide event included the